Qt Creator 4.8 Beta released

In Qt Creator 4.8 we’ll introduce experimental support for the language server protocol. For many programming languages there is a “language server” available, which provides IDEs with a whole lot of information about the code, as long as they support communicating via the protocol.

This means that by providing a client for the language server protocol, Qt Creator gets (some) support for many programming languages “for free”. Currently Qt Creator supports code completion, highlighting of the symbol under cursor, and jumping to the symbol definition, as well as integrates diagnostics from the language server. Highlighting and indentation are still provided by our generic highlighter, since they are not provided via the language server protocol.

At least from the perspective of rendering, text is often the most complex part of a traditional two-dimensional user interface. In such an interface, the two main components are rectangular images and text. The rectangular images are often quite static, and can be represented by two triangles and four indexes into a texture atlas that is uploaded to graphics memory once and then retained. This is something that has low complexity and which the graphics hardware has been optimized to handle quickly.

Text starts as a series of indexes into an international database of writing systems (Unicode). It is then, based on some selection algorithm, combined with one or more fonts, which is in principle a collection of shapes and some lookup tables and executable programs that convert said indexes into shapes and relative positions. These shapes, basically filled paths made out of bezier curves, then have to be rasterized at a specified size, and this can range from simple and neat outlines to complex ones with lots of detail. (By rasterization, I mean finding out how much of each target pixel, or subpixel in some cases, is covered by the shape.)

More in Tux Machines

Purism Ships Librem 5 Dev Kits as the Linux Phones Will Arrive in April 2019

Based on the newer and more powerful i.MX 8M 64-bit ARM boards, upgrading older devs kits based on the generic i.MX6 boards, the Librem 5 dev kits will soon arrive in the hands of early adopters as Purism needs all the help it can get from the community to continue and accelerate the development of its Linux-powered, privacy-focused phones, the Librem 5.
Also: Purism's Librem 5 Developer Kits Finally Shipping, Linux Phone Price Going Up To $699

VirtualBox 6.0 Officially Released with Major New Features, Here's What's New

Several months in development, VirtualBox 6.0 is finally here as the most advanced release of the widely used virtualization software that lets users run various operating systems in virtual machines on the same or different hosts. As expected, this is a major release that adds important new features to the application.
Highlights of VirtualBox 6.0 include support for exporting virtual machines to Oracle Cloud infrastructure, much-improved HiDPI and scaling support for high-end displays, including better detection of displays, support for surround speaker setups for Windows 10 Build 1809 users, and Hyper-V support on Windows hosts for better performance.
VirtualBox 6.0 Released With Better HiDPI Support, VMSVGA 3D Graphics On Linux

Just days after the NVIDIA 415.23 Linux driver release that was published to fix 4.20 kernel issues, the NVIDIA 415.25 driver is now available with new product support.
The NVIDIA 415.25 is out today in order to formally introduce support for the new TITAN RTX and Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards, the newest Turing-based products. The TITAN RTX is available beginning today from the NVIDIA store at $2499 USD meanwhile the flagship RTX 8000 card will retail for about $10k USD.

As some additional end-of-year kernel benchmarking, here is a look at the Linux 4.14 versus 4.20 kernel benchmarks on the same system for seeing how the kernel performance changed over the course of 2018. Additionally, Linux 4.20 was also tested a second time when disabling the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations that added some performance overhead to the kernel this year.
On a Core i9 7980XE system, Linux 4.14.4 vs. 4.20 Git (with default Spectre/Meltdown mitigations and then again without) were benchmarked.

Latest News

Audiocasts: Open Source Security Podcast, Linux Action News and More

On this episode of This Week in Linux, we got a lot of application releases to talk about like Nextcloud, Firefox, Vivaldi, Kdenlive and more. We got an update for the Emby proprietary news we covered last week, there’s a fork. The kernel team are discussing the potential removal of the x32 Subarchitecture. There’s some possibilities that Intel could be Open-Sourcing the FSP and we’ll talk about what that could mean. Later in the show we’ll talk Security News related to a SQLite Bug, New Malware Families Discovered, Apple’s T2 Chip issues with Linux and yet another security hole found in Google+. Then we’ll round out the show with some Linux Gaming news including some great games on sale. All that and much more!

Intel developers are working to open source the FSP, Fuchsia SDK and device repos show up in Android AOSP, and our BSD buddies have some big news.
Plus the pending removal of the x32 sub-architecture from Linux, why Uber is joining up with the Linux Foundation, and more.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to David Egts (@davidegts), Chief Technologist North America for the Public Sector at Red Hat (@redhatgov) about open source enthusiasm.

Manjaro vs Arch Linux Distribution Comparison

If you’ve looked at the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics in recent months, you might have noticed that the top place is currently occupied by Manjaro Linux, or simply Manjaro, an Arch Linux derivative that’s designed to work straight out of the box.
We wanted to know the secret behind Manjaro’s success, which is how this detailed comparison came to life. Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned Arch Linux veteran with a desire to explore what other Linux distributions have to offer or you’re a Linux newbie who’s not sure which of the two distributions to use, this article is for you.